# Learning MOO Programming

Wendy Schultz (wendy@hawaii.edu)
Sat, 4 May 1996 04:02:54 PDT

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    Just a brief message on this topic with regard to MOOs set up
    primarily as educational sites for disciplines unrelated to
    information sciences.

    My colleagues and I at the University of Hawaii have set up a
    little MOO, SeaMOO, primarily to let students experience working
    in groups on projects over the Net.  We are social scientists.

    Three of us initiated the MOO; one of whom actually programs rather
    well, the other two of us sat down with all the downloadable info
    related to MOO programming and laboriously worked through it (finding
    some fatal typos in some of the exercises) and made a few stupid
    mistakes and learned.  That is how I expect most people will learn
    MOO programming, altho' setting up a MOO as an interactive programming
    tutorial is a wonderful idea:  I'll send all our students there who
    have overweening ambitions to be wizards, because promoting people
    to wizard status is not the purpose of SeaMOO.

    In fact, none of the three "founders" is a wizard [has a wizard-bit];
    only "Nemo" has a wizard-bit.  When we want to work on the base patterns
    and foundation structures of the MOO, one of us will log in as Nemo.
    When we simply want to interact with students or build personal
    objects, we log in as ourselves.  SeaMOO has a guest category, a
    "permanent visitor" category [player status with no builder bit],
    and a player/builder category.  Nemo is it as far as wizard-bits go.

    Now, this is a small MOO, as I said, which we are using primarily for classes
    in political futuristics/futures studies, communications/IT majors, and
    English majors -- although it is available to all members of the university
    as a meeting place.  But we constrained wizardly activities -- at least
    until *we* have gotten much more experience in administering the MOO --
    to put a damper on the various people who seemed to want to be wizards
    just for the ego-enhancement of it [and surely we have not been the
    only people to witness that phenomena].  This may seem like benevolent
    dictatorship to some, but it's worked so far, and Nemo -- while a bit
    schizophrenic -- has seemed a pretty laid-back captain so far.

    Wendy L. Schultz                   |
    Hawaii Research Center             |   It is the duty of the future
             for Futures Studies       |      to be dangerous.
    wendy@hawaii.edu                   |    --  Alfred North Whitehead